I had one exchange with Robert Bellah and I missed an opportunity to ask him perhaps the most obvious question: how did he know American civil religion exists?  Our exchange was about my book, God and War, which the press had sent him in galleys.  He wrote me an email, as I have blogged about before, explaining that while he thought I had “moved the discussion of American civil religion in a good direction,” he hoped to avoid association with the term.  My fault had been to use his 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America” as a foundational text, or Read more